Even More Theatre

Vern Thiessen’s recently premiered 2023 play ICEMAN takes place in Barrie, Ontario, a few years after the Wall Street crash of 1929. The Great Depression has tightened its grip, jobs are disappearing, and two working-class brothers are watching the livelihood they depend upon slowly vanish.

Joe, played by James Vézina, and his somewhat slower-witted brother Rennie, played by Brian Melanson, make their living harvesting ice from Kempenfelt Bay. For generations, natural ice was cut from frozen lakes during winter, stored in insulated icehouses, and delivered to homes and businesses throughout the warmer months. Now mechanical refrigeration is threatening to make that occupation obsolete.

While technological progress promises convenience and greater profits, the men performing the hard physical labour are being left behind. When Joe and Rennie become convinced that their wealthy employer, Franklin Forsyth, known simply as “F.F.,” intends to destroy their livelihood while continuing to enrich himself, they decide to take matters into their own hands.

Forsyth, played by Gregory Flis, wakes to discover himself bound and gagged inside a wooden utility shed, kidnapped by his own employees. From that wonderfully simple premise, Thiessen constructs a tense confrontation about money, power, class, desperation and survival.

Much of the action takes place inside a wooden icehouse, creating a suitably claustrophobic setting for three men whose ideas about justice could hardly be more different. At the beginning of the play, F.F. is already tied to a chair while Joe casually smokes a cigarette and addresses the audience, immediately establishing both the danger and the dark humour of the situation.

ICEMAN asks some uncomfortable questions about capitalism and responsibility. Joe and Rennie may be kidnappers, but they are also workers watching their world disappear beneath them, while Forsyth represents an economic system in which those who own the machinery can prosper while those who performed the labour are discarded.

Thiessen is one of Canada’s most widely produced playwrights, with work staged across Canada, the United States and Europe. His many honours include the Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for Outstanding New Play, the City of Edmonton Arts Achievement Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Local audiences may already be familiar with his work. Theatre Burlington previously staged Thiessen’s First World War nursing drama BLUEBIRDS to considerable acclaim, while Dundas Little Theatre produced his acclaimed play EINSTEIN’S GIFT several years ago.

I have always been a great admirer of Canadian plays inspired by historical events and social conditions. Our history is filled with powerful stories about working people, technological change, economic inequality and communities struggling to survive periods of enormous upheaval. One of the best ways to celebrate Canadian heritage is to continue telling those stories from our own perspective. At a time when questions about Canadian identity and sovereignty are again part of the national conversation, supporting Canadian playwrights and Canadian theatre feels especially worthwhile.

ICEMAN offers audiences both a gripping thriller and an opportunity to consider who benefits from economic progress and who gets left behind. It is Canadian history transformed into living drama, and a timely reminder that the conflicts of the past can still speak directly to the present.

Elbows up, I say, because our stories are worth telling and preserving.

EVEN MORE THEATRE